Leaks

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had a tumultuous youth in Australia and grew into an autodidact with eclectic skills and a deep distrust of hierarchies and governments. In 2006, as he prepared to launch a digital enterprise devoted to the exposure of secrets, he wrote a sort of manifesto about the structure of official conspiracy and its effects on human welfare. He quoted Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Lord Halifax; the writing veers between lucidity and opaqueness. Its tone, familiar from science fiction, echoes the purifying language of purges and revolutions: “We must understand the key generative structure of bad government. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity.”

In July, WikiLeaks defied the Obama Administration by publishing seventy-six thousand intelligence and military field reports from the Afghan war. In October, it posted nearly four hundred thousand secret documents generated on the front lines of the Iraq conflict. The archives are bracing and valuable. There is a literary quality to their all-caps urgency and secret jargon. They disclose important new facts about civilian casualties, the torture of detainees by our allies, Iran’s exported violence, the disruptions caused by private contractors, and the debilitating patterns of clandestine warfare in two benighted regions.

America’s all-volunteer military has left many in the country at a remove from the debasements of the wars; the WikiLeaks archives offer an authentic transcript of them. All wars are terrible, but some must be fought. A democracy is strengthened when its citizens are confronted with the raw truths that follow from the choices of their elected leaders.

Whether WikiLeaks will prove over time to be a credible publisher of such truths is another question. Assange disclosed the names of informants in some of the war reports, even though doing so might endanger them and possibly cause their death. That action has prompted defections from the organization, as has some of Assange’s recent comportment. Internal messages quoted in the Times portray him as a self-aggrandizing control freak. In Sweden, prosecutors are reportedly investigating sexual-assault allegations against him. No charges have been filed in the case, and last week, on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Assange dismissed it as a “relatively trivial matter,” adding that King “should be ashamed” for raising the subject. In response, King, a scholar of the communications strategies of accused celebrities, tutored him on his tone-deafness: “Rape is not trivial. To say they”—the allegations—“were false, that’s your answer. ‘They’re false.’ That’s fine. That’s all we wanted to hear.”

Henry David Thoreau, in his founding essay on civil disobedience, wrote that “action from principle . . . divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.” He meant that a dissenter’s human frailty should not undermine the righteousness of his message. In the case of the WikiLeaks project, however, the sources of doubt involve more than Assange’s behavior and his editorial calls. They also involve his political conceptions and acuity.

In rolling out the Iraq files, Assange won an endorsement from Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND Corporation analyst who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. Assange has suggested that his organization’s disclosures are similarly important. At a press conference in London, he called the Iraq documents “the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.” In fact, the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day. Ellsberg and his collaborators in the press exposed lies by President Lyndon Johnson and his cabinet about critical decisions in the Vietnam War, such as Johnson’s exaggeration of enemy action in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which he used as a rationale for escalating combat. The WikiLeaks files contain nothing comparable. Nor are they distinctively comprehensive; there are many open archives in the United States and Europe that chronicle the depredations of wars past, unit by unit, prison camp by prison camp. It is not necessary to promote the value of the WikiLeaks archive by overstating its importance.

If the organization continues to attract sources and vast caches of unfiltered secret documents, it will have to steer through the foggy borderlands between dissent and vandalism, and it will have to defend its investigative journalism against those who perceive it as a crime. Assange is animated by the idea of radical transparency, but WikiLeaks as yet lacks a fixed address. Nor does it offer its audiences any mechanism for its own accountability. If the organization were an insurgency, these characteristics might be in its nature. Assange declares that he is pioneering an improved, daring form of journalism. That profession, however, despite its flaws, has constructed its legitimacy by serving as a check on governmental and corporate power within constitutional arrangements that assume the viability of the rule of law. The Times and the Washington Post, in successfully defending their decision to publish the Pentagon Papers before the Supreme Court, extended considerably the political impact of their revelations.

WikiLeaks has recently been in discussions with lawmakers in Iceland about trying to concoct the world’s most extensive press-freedom regime there. The idea apparently is to transform Iceland, in the aftermath of its recent, disastrous experiments with offshore banking, into the Cayman Islands of First Amendment-inspired subversion. A volcanic-island nation may well find whistle-blowing to be a compatible flagship industry. And it could provide the project with a sustainable basis for legal legitimacy.

It is not clear, however, that such normalcy within a national system would entirely suit Assange’s purposes. In a part of his manifesto titled “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” he wrote, “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly, for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed.” If dissenters hacked and published enough secret information harbored by governments, he went on, this might disrupt what he imagined to be the absolute dependency of governments on flows of hidden data. “An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself against the opponents it induces,” Assange concluded. That is, he believed that he could break governments by siphoning the secrets that nourish them.

But something like the opposite may be the case: if WikiLeaks cannot learn to think efficiently about its publishing choices, it will risk failure, not only because of the governmental opponents it has induced but also because so far it lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media. ♦

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.